Foxvideo Productions

Media Production

I've just had an interesting problem with viewing clips in the Canvas in FCP 7. Quite simply when playing any HD or ProRes stuff, the picture in the Canvas broke up into pixelated squares. It didn't happen all the time but most of the time, indicating a setting problem. I tried everything, trash prefs, Playback controls, RT, unlimited, CUDA update and still couldn't find the problem. I had some time this morning to try and solve this and finally found it. In the timeline, I selected the RT drop down, unchecked the "Video Scopes Playback" and my problem was solved. Seems my Mac is not fast enough to cope with HD and videoscope updates in real time playback - Doh!

A good video / DVD / Promo relies heavily on the audio you use, speech, effects and music tracks can make (or break) all the hard work you've put into the picture content. Quality, licensed and affordable music can be difficult to find, I've got an external drive totally dedicated to music tracks I've collected or bought, indexed by name, length and playable so I can browse to find the track I think I'll need and I'm always on the lookout for music to add to it. Some years ago, I think it was at either an APV or IOV video show I bought a YOPO CD "Music to Voiceover 2" and I used a couple of tracks from it throughout the years, During a house move several CD's of music, clipart and photo's I had disappeared, I think a box of stuff just didn't quite make it to the new house and probably got eaten by the "removal lorry monster", the YOPO CD was one of them and I never got around to replacing it.

A recent marketing email from YOPO was offering ALL their CD's for just £4.99 each - this was too good an offer to miss and replace the 1 CD and buy others. I ordered online and was offered immediate dispatch, 4 days later they hadn't turned up so I emailed YOPO asking if there was a problem, Jonathan told me they'd been sent and he'd replace them immediately, I suggested we wait a day or so as I wasn't in a rush, they still never arrived so YOPO sent another 2 plus an extra CD as way of an apology (not that it was their fault!). As with all the YOPO CD's this is "License paid" meaning no additional MCPS license is required and web use is included, at £4.99 per CD it's well worth buying a few, you can never have enough usable music!

I've got a few moments while a render is going on so I thought I'd just post an update of recent 'stuff'. I suppose the most interesting is an edit I've just started. About 15 years ago when we first put a Media 100 digital edit suite in, we were contacted by a group wanting to edit their first feature film, it was a disaster - they'd shot on SVHS with no timecode and arrived with a box of about 20 x 3 hour tapes and a collection of hand written notes, in an effort to try to help out I dubbed all the tapes to BetaSP, produced a set of BITC VHS's and they managed to produce an EDL that we were able to work with. When the edit was finished I suggested they consult us before starting a new project to discuss their options. 2 years later they got in touch and Sue ended up spending 5 days shooting BetaSP on the Gower Peninsular in glorious summer sunshine. I produced a set of BITC's on VHS from the camera tapes and sent them off expecting an EDL back from them when they'd decided on the edits.........5 years later I got a call asking if we could still do an edit from the material!

I explained BetaSP was now out of date, we'd sold the Beta machine and moved to Final Cut Pro for editing, I offered to dub the tapes to DVCAM which we could then edit in Final Cut Pro, again I sent them a new set of BITC's ............Come forward another 5 years and I get an email asking if it was still possible to edit this!

2 days ago an EDL turned up in my Inbox, I'd already captured all the tapes, about 7.5 hours of stuff and lined it up on 3 timelines with matching timecode. I then laid an FCP timecode reader over it so I had 3 timelines that matched their BITC VHS's, it was then a simple matter of cut / paste from one timeline into another new timeline and 6 hours later I had an edited rough cut that came out to 9.5Gb, a couple of trips through Miro Video Converter and I had a 350Mb MP4 that went up to Youtube, I'm just wondering now if it'll be another 5 years before I hear anything.......?

Just noticed a hit on this page so I thought I'd give an update.

It took another year or so before I heard anything! The Director and Producer got in touch and said they wanted to go ahead, we used the rough edit, made some changes, added some titles and credits and the producer found some copyright free music, in all it took around 10 days work over a couple of months. Some time later the director uploaded it in two parts to YouTube - you can see it here:

The Sand Boy - Written and produced by Perry Buck, directed by Paul Keown.

You might have seen a couple of posts on here about using copyright and copyright free / royalty free music. One site I find I'm using regularly is JewelBeat, their single track stuff is just $0.99 or £0.65p.

A piece I was working on recently needed 'The Last Post' on the end, I've tried to find a legally usable version of this before and failed, JewelBeat had a very good version that fitted perfectly. I've also bought an "Album" from them recently, I'd produced a DVD from around 80 flower displays, the album "Piano Inspirations" (£12.36) allowed me to chose around 4 different tracks to lay under the video track. One area currently 'under discussion' is web use of normally licensed MCPS music tracks, all JewelBeat stuff is licensed for web use along with most other uses including broadcast, I'd suggest you read their licence agreement to answer any questions you might have. In short, I'd strongly recommend you check them out.

NB. I use JewelBeat and have no affiliate connection with them.

(I've uploaded the video using the 'The Last Post' to YouTube, I was rather hoping YT would have me for using Copyrighted music again and I could show them the licence I have, but their clever software must have sussed it was a Royalty free version, Doh!)

Like most websites, this site uses cookies to allow analysis of pages visited and to display videos.To continue to use all the functions of this site please agree to the use of cookies. For more info please see our Privacy Page